On Thu, May 30, 2002 at 04:52:51PM -0700, Aaron J. Grier wrote:
> On Thu, May 30, 2002 at 11:43:06PM +0200, Alistair Crooks wrote:
> 
> > However, you have not answered the question.  The question I asked was
> > why you want to force everyone to have Perl installed on their build
> > machines just so that they can apply patches.
> 
> I can understand patching configure alone, since it could save the perl
> requirement for building, but only on the condition that configure.in is
> ALSO patched, and that there be an option to unconditionally regenerate
> configure via autoconf/make.
> 
> part of the appeal of pkgsrc is that you are actually building from
> source, and I believe that includes re-generating machine-generated
> files when possible.

I would tend to disagree. pkgsrc is out there, and is being used
by a large number of people. These range from instances in large
organisations, to those of us with one box and, perhaps, a modem,
to people trying to install a machine for a trade show, to...

Take the pkgsrc/security/sudo package, for example. You are honestly
trying to tell us that EVERYONE should be forced to download Perl
to the box on which it is being built, and to build Perl as a
pre-requisite to applying patches to the sudo package?

If you are, I would contend that you have your priorities all wrong.

pkgsrc is about building from source, yes.  But it is also designed
to make people's lives easier, rather than harder.  If you want to
regenerate configure scripts from configure.in or configure.ac,
feel free - the source is there for you. But please don't force it
upon everyone.

Regards,
Alistair